Retail sales facilities (e.g., large department stores) typically display products on their primary display locations (e.g., shelves) on the sales floor, but often offer products for sale to consumers on feature display locations designed to attract consumers' attention to the products. Retail sales facilities may set their inventory management systems to update the inventory management databases to indicate that a product may be displayed on the sales floor both in a primary display location and a feature display location.
When a product is sold at the point of sale device (e.g., sale register) on the sales floor, the scanning of the product at the point of sale device does not indicate whether the product being purchased by the consumer came from the primary display location or from the feature display location. A problem that occurs as a result of products being sold from feature display locations on the sales floor is that a worker at the retail sales facility bringing a replenishment product to the sales floor typically does not know that this product is sold both in the primary display location and the feature display location.
When the worker arrives at the primary display location of the product with one or more replenishment products only to see that the primary display location of the product on the sales floor does not have available space for the replenishment products, the worker may assume that the replenishment request for the product was erroneous and would return the replenishment products to the stock room to be re-binned. As a result, the replenishment products brought out onto the sales floor to replace the products known to be sold to consumers do not end up on the sales floor, but end up back in a storage bin in the stock room, while empty spaces allotted for these products continue to exist on the sale floor, undesirably leading to possible lost sales for the retail sales facility.
Elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments. Certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. The terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.